Citing generative AI in APA Style: Part 1—Reference formats

Since the APA Style team wrote our 2023 post about citing ChatGPT, the landscape of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has changed dramatically. You have likely seen, and probably used, other AI toolsopens in new window in the meantime, and using these tools for assistance in the writing process may no longer seem unusual.

Although it’s still not a good idea to submit AI-generated work as though you did it yourself—doing so would be considered unethical, for example, academic misconduct for students—there are many potentially legitimate ways to use AI tools within the context of academic writing. For example, some authors—be they students, researchers, reviewers, instructors, or others—are using AI tools to search for information, summarize literature in conjunction with reading it, edit or analyze their own writing, brainstorm ideas, translate text, proofread for consistency and style, generate tables and figures, create and refine code, and much more. However, the details of what AI use is allowed and how it should be disclosed depend on many factors, such as instructor, departmental, and publisher policies. And of course, it is possible to cite AI tools without using them, such as if you are writing a paper about AI.

Because there are many issues to explore surrounding AI, we have split our advice into different posts. This will also allow us to add additional posts as needed in the future. This post is about how to cite AI chats and AI tools generally in APA Style.

Additional posts are available on these topics:

• AI as a search engine and AI integrated into common software
• Is AI “allowed” in APA Style?

Transparency is an important part of scientific reporting—that is, you should describe what you did and why so that readers can understand, evaluate, and potentially replicate your work. Thus, if you used AI when writing your paper, it will usually be necessary to disclose the use and cite the chat and/or AI tool.

Intrepid users of APA Style may have noticed that APA Style does not require citations to common software, such as Microsoft Office and Adobe products. Why should AI be treated differently? Although the day may come that AI is considered so common that no reference to the use of AI generally is needed, for now, it is an emerging technology that should be noted. And, although ChatGPT is famous, readers are likely to be less familiar with the hundreds if not thousands of other AI tools now available.

Thus, we encourage authors to err on the side of thoroughness and transparency by including citations and references for AI in their APA Style papers. Whether you cite the tool as a whole or specific chats depends on what is ethical and most helpful to readers, as we outline in the sections to follow.

In our 2023 post on citing ChatGPT, we recommended citing only the AI tool, not the specific chat, because at the time, it was not possible to retrieve and share specific chats (and retrievability is a core requirement for most APA Style references).

However, most AI chat tools, including ChatGPT, now include a sharing option that typically provides users with a unique URL and a title for each chat. This makes creating an APA Style reference for a specific chat a simple matter of following the author–date–title–source format used in most APA Style references.

Include a reference and in-text citation for a specific AI chat foremostly when doing so will be helpful for readers.

Here is a reference template for a specific AI chat:

To create reference examples for this post, we asked four AI tools for a list of grammar concepts that students should know by the end of high school. Our prompt was “I’d like a list of grammar topics that a student should understand by the time they graduate from high school.” In this scenario, we want to include those chats as references in a paper.

Here are the references for those chats:

Select the four elements of author, date, title, and source for your references to an AI chat as follows: 

• Author: The author is the company responsible for developing the AI tool. Although these companies did not “write” the generated text in the traditional sense, the author element of an APA Style reference is broadly defined as who is “responsible for a work.” Whereas in some other references that is an individual author, editor, film director, or podcast host, here it is the organization that created the AI tool. AI itself cannot be an author because it is not a living, conscious human who can give consent and promise to abide by the rights and responsibilities that come with authorship. For example, OpenAI is the author of ChatGPT, and Google is the author of Gemini.
• Date: The date in an AI chat reference is the specific year, month, and day on which a chat occurred or concluded.
• Title: The title is the title of the chat (in italic sentence case) followed by a bracketed description to clarify for readers the nature of the source; for example, “[Generative AI chat].” Adapt the wording within square brackets as needed; it is flexible so you can choose wording that will “best convey the information readers need” (per Section 9.21 of the Publication Manual; APA, 2020, p. 292). In most AI tools, users can edit the title of the chat, so before creating the reference, consider editing the title within the AI tool to be something descriptive and helpful for readers.
• Source: The source begins with the name of the AI tool, which can be general (e.g., ChatGPT or Gemini) or the name of the model (e.g., ChatGPT-5 or Gemini 2.5 Flash). The final piece of the source element is the URL of the chat.

Note that if you share a chat’s URL, users can continue that chat with the AI. However, in the tools we tested, the continued conversation does not seem to be saved for anyone except the person who continued the chat; other readers who visit the chat link would access just the original conversation.

Cite the AI tool in the text where appropriate, most likely in the Method section. You might have a sentence such as the following: “I used Claude 3.7 Sonnet (Anthropic, 2025), a generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool, to generate a list of grammatical concepts that high school students should know by the end of the 12th grade.” You could then elaborate on what the AI generated in the text as desired, and the reference list would include a reference for the chat as shown in the earlier examples. In addition to citing the tool or the specific chat in your text, you might also make a general mention of how AI was used in your paper’s author note. Author note policies vary by publisher.

It is also possible to cite an AI tool generally and not a specific chat. Cite an AI tool generally when it would be unhelpful, unethical, or otherwise inappropriate to cite a specific chat—as well as when you want to point to the existence of the AI tool but not necessarily cite specific information from it.

The reference template for an AI tool in general uses the software reference template from Section 10.10 of the Publication Manual. This format is consistent with our advice from the 2023 blog post about citing ChatGPT, and we’ve included additional clarifications in a subsequent section of this post.

Here is the template for citing an AI tool generally:

Some scenarios in which it would be appropriate to cite the AI tool generally would be if you used AI for the following:

• to edit, analyze, organize, or refine your own writing—you do not need to put all the drafts and iterations of your work on display by citing the specific chat unless doing so is desirable or helpful for some reason. Because you are the human author, you must check the output of the AI to ensure that the content is accurate to the best of your knowledge; disclosing in the Method section or author note that you have used AI in the preparation of your paper and citing the tool. That in-text citation in the paper’s body plus a general reference to the tool, rather than a reference for each chat, is enough.
• to translate a source, or a few sentences of a source, into another language to aid in your own understanding of the work—your paper would not cite the AI tool but would instead include a citation to the original source, as usual, if you quote or paraphrase from the work. Depending on the copyright status of the translated work, it may not be appropriate for you to essentially reproduce the work inside of an AI chat reference. Also, take care that nuances of language may be lost in translation, regardless of the method of translation (AI, Google Translate, etc.). If your work relies on translation (such as if you are adapting a survey to be available in another language), it is best to involve a human translator to check the accuracy and appropriateness of the translation before relying on and publishing it.
• to translate your own writing into another language when submitting for publication or a student assignment. State that you used AI to translate, provide a reference to the tool generally. If possible, have a speaker of that language review your work for accuracy before publication.
• to create or refine code, such as writing code in R or SPSS and having AI adjust the code as needed. Whether it is appropriate to provide a reference to the full chat containing the code itself would depend on the centrality of the code to the work.
• to create tables, figures, or other visual representations—indicate that you used AI in the table or figure note.
• as part of the methodology of your work, such as having AI function as a tutor or therapist for study participants. Providing a reference for every chat and every participant might compromise participant confidentiality, which is an ethical problem, or create an overwhelmingly long and unhelpful reference list. As a researcher, you should retain those chats just as you would a full data set, but your actual report may contain only highlights or summary data, and a reference for the AI tool generally is enough. Note that your institution may have a preferred AI tool for such work that will maintain the privacy and security of your data. We encourage authors to consult their institutional policies for AI use.

Here are some example references for AI tools as a whole/generally:

• The author is the company responsible for developing the AI tool.
• The date is the year in which the AI tool was most recently updated. If you are unsure of the date, ask the AI. For example, as of this post, ChatGPT was most recently updated in August 2025, so 2025 goes in the reference. If the tool does not indicate the date of last update, use the copyright date provide on the website or app.
• The title is the name of the AI tool, which can be general (e.g., ChatGPT or Gemini) or the name of the model (e.g., ChatGPT-5 or Gemini 2.5 Flash).
• Provide a description of the AI in brackets after the title. For chat tools, currently “[Large language model]” is usually correct. But, other descriptions are possible; use the description that best fits the type of AI model or tool used.
• The source element is only the URL of the AI tool because the author and publisher of the AI are the same. As in all APA Style references in which the author is the same as the publisher, that name is included only once in the reference (in the author element).

In the text of the paper, such as in the Method section, describe how you used the AI as needed. For example, you might have the following sentence: “I used ChatGPT (OpenAI, 2025) to edit my paper and provide feedback on clarity and flow.” You may also provide a general description in the author note, but an in-text citation should still be included in the body of the paper. The reference list would then include an entry for the AI tool as just shown.

Many users have had questions about how to document AI prompts, which is a similar, but related, issue to citing AI chats or AI tools. An AI prompt is the instruction that you give AI to generate results. The title of the chat might be similar to, or the same as, an initial prompt (depending on whether users can edit the title), but it is distinct in that it does not necessarily capture all the iterations and refinements typical of most AI interactions.

Researchers should document the prompts used with AI tools for their own records. To the extent that it helps readers, these prompts can be included where the AI use is disclosed, or elsewhere as appropriate, such as in an appendix or supplemental material. Whether that’s appropriate and useful for readers is a decision you should make in conjunction with your editor or instructor. Discussing prompts in this way is similar to how authors may report summary statistics (and not every data point) in their paper but retain the full data set for their records and plan to make them available upon reader request.

For example, within a chat with AI, you might begin with one prompt and then refine the prompt after seeing the output. When writing about the prompt(s), for example, you might say something like this:

I provided the following prompt to Gemini (Google, 2025): “Please create an image of students in a classroom studying grammar concepts.” After reviewing the initial image created, I refined the images by adding more detail, asking Gemini to include more racial and ethnic diversity in the student population and specifying the age range should be adolescents.

The reference you create would be for the chat, not the prompt(s).

Providing information about prompts increases transparency, helps readers better understand exactly how you used the AI tool, and could even help with future research replications or extensions of your work. For example, future researchers could try using the same prompt(s) with other models and/or AI tools.

Thus, when deemed useful for readers, prompts can be described in the text, but they are not included in the reference. This is because a prompt

• doesn’t fit into one of the four APA Style reference elements: author, date, title, and source.
• doesn’t help readers retrieve the work, which is the rationale for the four elements included in references.
• would likely be difficult to fully and accurately report in a single reference. Because an author might prompt the AI several times and make refinements, details about prompts are best described in the text.
• would likely to be too long for references. In references for social media, we guard against excessive length by truncating the title (the text of the social media post) at 20 words. However, if prompts were included in references, limiting them to 20 words might unduly limit their usefulness to readers. If the prompt is important, it’s better to include it in full in the Method section or another appropriate spot such as an appendix as determined in collaboration with your instructor, editor, or publisher.

Describing prompts as needed in the text is similar to how authors sometimes describe aspects of a source in the text when those details do not appear in the reference. For example, sometimes a webpage will credit the author (who is included in the reference) and also a reviewer. The reviewer’s name is not included in the reference, but if it is particularly important, this detail can be included with the in-text citation or in context in text. This is, of course, rarely needed and up to the author’s discretion.

In our 2023 post about citing ChatGPT, we recommended including the version number of the AI tool in the reference because at that time the version was always indicated to users. The version number is also part of the APA Style reference template for software, the best-fit reference type from the Publication Manual. However, we no longer advise including the version number in every AI reference by default. Instead, include the model name if it is available (it is also acceptable to just use the name of the tool).

What’s the difference between a model and a version? A model refers to the architecture of the AI model. For example, when using ChatGPT, a general name for the tool, you may choose ChatGPT-4-turbo or ChatGPT-5, two different models of ChatGPT. Newer models may have dramatically more sophisticated reasoning capabilities and outputs than older models. If you are unsure what model of an AI tool you are using, ask the AI.

In contrast, version numbers generally indicate iterations of a model. Although AI tools frequently allow the user to select the model they want to use, the user likely does not have the same leeway to select a version of that model. Instead, the tools generally provide users with the most current version of the selected model.

Furthermore, ChatGPT no longer specifies version numbers, and we have been unable to find prominent AI tools that include version information. Thus, a reference to ChatGPT should include either “ChatGPT” as a general name or “ChatGPT-5” as the name of a specific model, but the version number need not be included.

If you do find an AI with version information, you can include it in the reference, if desired—in parentheses and unitalicized—after the tool name/model.

American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1037/0000165-000